Congress has approved more than $100 billion in aid for Ukraine since Russia invaded the country in February 2022. Throughout that time, lawmakers have taken to X, formerly known as Twitter, to defend that funding, to call for more assistance, or to argue that aid should be audited, paused, or stopped altogether. Our team analyzed 2,295 tweets that members of Congress posted about the war during the first six months of 2023. Data shows that Republicans are steering the conversation. GOP lawmakers have posted 59% more tweets about the war than their Democratic colleagues. More strikingly, Republican posts are being retweeted and liked roughly two-and-a-half times more than Democratic posts. While the most retweeted GOP posts are generally critical of US assistance for Ukraine, we found more Republican posts that supported Kyiv’s war efforts than posts that called US aid into question. Democrats, on the other hand, presented a far more unified front in their commitment to supporting Ukraine, but their relatively limited number of posts about the war suggests that it is not a messaging priority. The absence of a high-volume pro-Ukraine push combined with the popularity of anti-Ukraine content on X has created the perception that US political support for Ukraine is waning and fracturing, but that idea is driven by an influential and vocal minority in one party, not the majority in either party.
